Reflections

In middle school, I started ditching class. I’d show up at school in the morning and spend the rest of the day hiding in the bathrooms or skulking around the hallways avoiding hall-pass monitors. It’s not like I planned to stop going to class. I simply walked into the school building one morning and didn’t […]

This is not my story alone but Yours within me. The shadows that surrounded me were but You standing beside me. For how would I have known the shadows had there been no Light? I was 10 years old when I began hearing voices, like ghosts speaking undecipherable words, muffled, and indistinct. The words, if

The summer of my 10th birthday would test the fragile normalcy of our family. I had completed the 4th grade, my brother Bill (aka Billy) was due to start his freshman year in high school, and David, our oldest brother, was slated to start his freshman year in college. That summer, Dad accepted a position

We spread mom’s ashes in the meadows of Maroon Bells in Colorado. By the time Mom was in hospice care, Dad was in a nursing home, intermittently cursing the staff and bemoaning his current situation. We brought him to Mom’s bedside, two days before she would succumb to the gentle grasp of the morphine which

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. My father and the many family upheavals he would initiate are threads that run through the quilt of my life. My brothers and I may have taken different roads as adults, but dad was a powerful influence. He

In the summer of my 5th year, we moved to a new house. Years later an uncle would tell me dad had lost the little house in which I was rocked and wandered in the dark hours, fighting off the blackbirds of my nightmares. My uncle said losing the house broke my dad’s spirit. Our

A year before I was born, my mother had a skiing accident, shattering the tibia in her right leg. It was a horrific break and her leg was struggling to heal. I have been told that after a failed bone graft, the doctors advised my mother that pregnancy would increase her calcium and blood levels,

I just had to get out of the house. The quarantine had taken its toll. Plus, I was once again losing my nerve to write this blog. Self-doubt is insidious; it can be emotionally crippling and, typical of my usual emotional behavior, I was wracked with insecurities. So on a sunny morning, I decided to

I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, not in the traditional sense. Yet when people encourage you to write because they like what you write, then you begin to imagine yourself as A Writer. No Great American Novel within me; no Ernest Hemmingway or John Steinbeck, I. Still, with voices inside and out telling